


Behind the Camera (Transcript)

by ama



Series: An Exploration of the Nadir-Barnes Canon [3]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Dialogue-Only, Gen, Interviews, M/M, Muslim Character, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:02:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24529582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/ama
Summary: Academy Award-winning writer and director Abed Nadir visits a New York film school to talk about his three critically-acclaimed films, the importance of story-telling in forming and honoring relationships, and, unexpectedly, monkeys.
Relationships: Troy Barnes/Abed Nadir
Series: An Exploration of the Nadir-Barnes Canon [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1772737
Comments: 32
Kudos: 214





	Behind the Camera (Transcript)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is set a couple of years after "Comparative Perspectives on Matrimony and the Modern Family." There is a fic that goes in between the two (and I'm guessing the topic will be pretty obvious about 20% of the way through), but that one was taking a long time and this one wasn't. I can't promise it will get written, because if you look through my profile you'll see I have an annoying habit of creating two and only two fics for a series and then getting distracted by something else. But I'll try.
> 
> Also, there are many, many references to TV shows, movies, and actors in this fic. Some of them are real, and some of them are totally made up. Any real thing that wasn't mentioned in Community at any point is marked with an asterisk, except for Abed's list of favorite movies, which is 100% real and stolen in part from the old NBC website.

MODERATOR: Hello, and welcome everybody to the third lecture in our Behind the Camera lecture series. Tonight we are going to be talking with Abed Nadir, the writer-director of _Police Justice, Voyage of the Star Ship Legacy,_ and _The Pen,_ as well as a former director and assistant producer on the Catherine Rhodes-created comedy _8bit,_ which ran for five seasons on the CW. Now, when we first started advertising this lecture, Abed, you were our young up-and-comer, but that was before your latest film won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for two others.

[Applause]

MODERATOR: So I think we’re going have to revise that title. Thank you so much for joining us tonight.

ABED NADIR: You’re welcome, thanks for inviting me.

MODERATOR: Now, Abed, as I just mentioned, you’ve directed three films now and were also the lead writer on all three, is that correct?

ABED NADIR: Yeah, along with Marisol de Soto, my writing partner.

MODERATOR: I’m going to give a little summary of these films for those who haven’t seen them as we talk, but first, would you mind telling us how you got into the industry in the first place?

ABED NADIR: Sure. I’ve always been kind of obsessed with TV and movies. My parents divorced when I was six, my dad was busy running his restaurant, and I’ve always been pretty terrible at understanding people, so watching TV and movies was how I spent a lot of my time and how I learned to relate to people. When I finished high school, I wanted to go to film school but my dad said we couldn’t afford it yet, and then later he said he wouldn’t pay for film school at all because I spent all my free time outside dollar theaters telling people not to go see _The Phantom Menace_.

[Laughter]

ABED NADIR: That’s not a joke, I really did that.

[Laughter]

ABED NADIR: I ended up going to Greendale Community College, in my hometown in Colorado, originally for business and then I switched to film. While I was there, I did a weekly web video series based on me and my friends, I did a couple of documentaries, and a really weird experiential film that I don’t have any copies of, thankfully. Oh, and a commercial with Luis Guzman. That’s still available on the Greendale website, I think.

I stayed in Colorado for about two years after finishing my degree, and from there I got hired working for _8bit_ , which for those of you who haven’t seen it, was a really great workplace sitcom set in a video game studio, I think it’s all available on Hulu now. I was working as a production assistant at first, then eventually an assistant director and director—

MODERATOR: And, correct me if I’m wrong, but your first director credit was quite early in the show’s run, wasn’t it?

ABED NADIR: Yeah, I got lucky. We had a bit of a ratings slump in the second season, and one night I was talking to Catherine Rhodes, the creator, who was frustrated because someone at the network was telling her that basically the show needed to be dumber and have broader appeal. I told her that was stupid advice, because if it stayed good, either it would get renewed or it would get canceled and be one of those shows that people complained about getting canceled, which unfortunately is what happened although it did go on for a bit longer, and either way that’s better than becoming mediocre and going on six seasons too long. I mean, seriously, given the choice, would you rather helm the next _Firefly_ or the next _Supernatural*_?

[Audience “ooooh”ing]

ABED NADIR: Oh, is that controversial? My bad. Speaking of gone too soon, does anyone else miss _The Cape_? No? I really want to bring _The Cape_ back. Anyway. I guess that was what Catherine needed to hear. She ended up giving me some early opportunities to get into directing on set, and eventually she was the one who helped get people interested in my movies, too.

MODERATOR: Great. Let’s talk about those movies. The first one, _Police Justice_ is a deconstruction of the classic police thriller, starring Timothy Olyphant* as Jake Ceartas, a veteran police officer trying to cope with his deteriorating marriage and reprimands for his unconventional ways, and Larissa Coleman as Paige Starr, an idealistic rookie with a very different view of what a modern police force should look like. Now, in some ways this is probably the film of yours that would be most familiar to audiences, in that it’s a recognizable example of a popular genre. But it also subverts some of the most popular tropes associated with police dramas. I’ve actually seen a lot of comparisons to _Hot Fuzz*_ , the Sean Penn movie, in that way, although this is a drama and not a comedy. Abed, could you say a few words about this movie?

ABED NADIR: I started the screenplay for this while I was still in college. It was terrible. I love police thrillers, I love cop show tropes, but it was just an endless string of tropes with no heart—and I’m terrible at names, so in the first few drafts, the main character’s name was literally Police Justice, which is apparently bad.

[Laughter]

ABED NADIR: Buzz Hickey, who has a co-writing credit, was a former police officer who worked as a criminology teacher at Greendale, and he helped me out with some of those details. The main character’s catchphrase is based on something Hickey used to say all the time. That realism is what made the film smart instead of formulaic. Then I moved to LA and met Marisol, and she had a lot to say about the pacing, the suspense, and how to build up the characters. That’s typically how our collaboration works. Marisol’s not great with coming up with plot ideas, but her character work is amazing. If anyone’s read any of her short stories, you’ll see it in those, too—nothing ever happens, but the dialogue is always great. When it comes to movies, I come up with the story and she makes it watchable.

MODERATOR: You must have been holding onto this script for, what, at least five years?

ABED NADIR: A bit longer than that, yeah.

MODERATOR: Obviously, learning how to take criticism is a big part of what we try to teach here, and after five-plus years, it’s easy to get emotionally attached to a script. Did you find it hard to put it out there after so long?

ABED NADIR: Not really. How do I put this… _Police Justice_ was a means to an end. You know? It’s why Lucas did _American Graffiti_ before _Star Wars._ I knew nobody was going to give me money to make _Voyage_ or _The Pen_ if I hadn’t done _Police Justice_ first. And I’m not knocking it! I’m not saying it’s a bad movie or that I didn’t have fun doing it. Actually, I had been pushed to make a version of it while I was in school—long story—where there was a time crunch and a budget crunch and I had to lower my standards a lot, and it was probably the only time in my life I didn’t enjoy being behind a camera, and that’s not what happened here. I really enjoyed making _Police Justice_ and I’m proud of what it is, but it wasn’t my dream project, and that made it a lot easier to handle criticism. Relatively speaking. I was still a control freak about it because I’m a director, but less of a control freak than I could have been.

MODERATOR: Well, we might circle back to that in a bit, but this seems like a natural segue to your second film, _Voyage of the Star Ship Legacy. Voyage of the Star Ship Legacy_ is about a family out of sorts. Jane, played by Maya Rudolph*, inherits a small sailboat, the titular _Legacy,_ after the death of her father and decides that she, her workaholic husband Joe, and their three kids should take it on a pilgrimage from their home in Southern California to a cabin she visited as a child in British Columbia. The film is told largely from the perspective of the youngest child, Miles, who often has fantasy sequences of the family’s trip as though it were an alien adventure. Now, what’s particularly interesting about this film is that Miles is also Deaf—

ABED NADIR: With a capital D, yes.

MODERATOR: So the film does have sound and a soundtrack, but the dialogue is only clearly audible when Miles is able to read the lips of the speaker or when that person is using sign language, all of which is intelligible to the viewing audience as well—assuming that the audience reads lips or knows sign language. This is almost unprecedented for a film with such wide distribution. I know you’ve spoken about this in interviews before, but could you talk about what led you to make that choice?

ABED NADIR: Okay. First off, almost none of that was in the original script for this film. When it first got picked up, it was still a rough draft, and some of the producers, people at the studio, thought that it needed something a little _more_. I had no idea what that was. So I showed it to a lot of my friends, and coworkers, and a lot of them gave me suggestions on how to improve it, but I thought most of them were terrible. Then I showed it to my kids. My husband and I have two sons—they were eight and ten at the time—and our younger son, Leon, is Deaf. He has some hearing, and he uses hearing aid sometimes, but he prefers to communicate with ASL when he can, and we always have closed captioning on at home when we’re watching movies or TV as a family.

I asked him and Rickie what they thought would make the movie better. Rickie had some joke suggestions—actually the shark joke that was in all the trailers, that was his. But Leon just said he was sure it would be great, and could I make sure that the movie theater reserved closed captioning devices for when we went to see it. Which surprised me, because we go to movies all the time, and sometimes the movie we want to see isn’t available with closed captioning or the devices are all in use already, and Leon had never mentioned not being able to understand—I assumed that, with his hearing aid and maybe the better sound quality in a theater, he did okay. And he said no, a lot of the times it wasn’t clear, but he never said anything because he just liked going to the movies with me.

[Audience awws]

ABED NADIR: Yeah, we’re an adorable family. Anyway, most theaters provide accommodations to Deaf or blind viewers through the use of individual assistive devices, but those can be expensive and theaters sometimes don’t have enough, or any if they think they can get away with it, and it was very, very rare for English-language movies to be displayed with closed captioning for the entire theater outside of specifically-timed or requested showings. My first thought was that I would just include closed captioning in the cut of the film and essentially forcing everyone to display it that way, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that wasn’t good enough.

When I first started this script, Jane was really the point of view character and the kids were kind of incidental. It wasn’t an adult movie, per se—there was no extreme content—it just didn’t consider kids as a topic or an audience. And that changed after I got my kids, because I wanted them to be able to enjoy it. Miles became the main character so that this could be a movie for them. And that’s why I decided to move away from just captioning. Captions are a cop out, because what they do is make a movie for hearing people accessible to Deaf audiences, and they do it poorly. I decided that I wanted to make a movie for Deaf audiences that was accessible to hearing audiences.

[Applause]

ABED NADIR: That being said, the screenplay had already been optioned by a major studio that wanted to release it to a wide audience, so there were some compromises we needed to make. Films like _Deafula_ *, _Sign Gene_ *, _No Ordinary Hero_ *, which were independent films or produced by Deaf studios, they’re all essentially foreign language films, ASL films translated into English. _Voyage of the Star Ship Legacy_ isn’t that. Go see those movies, if you haven’t, by the way—unique low-budget genre films are what makes life worth living. Anyway. The closest parallel to _Voyage_ in terms of scope is probably _A Quiet Place_ *, which still has significantly less sound and English dialogue than _Voyage_ , because it’s a horror movie that’s actively trying to unsettle its hearing audience. We weren’t trying to unsettle anyone, or potentially turn away hearing audiences, so the film still has a soundtrack and ambient sound and audible dialogue. But we worked very closely with the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness and brought on Marlee Matlin* as a producer—actually I don’t remember _who_ brought on Marlee Matlin, I just came to a meeting one day and she was there. Maybe nobody invited her. Maybe she has some kind of Deaf spidey-sense and just showed up. I don’t know—I’m going to text her.

[Laughter]

ABED NADIR: Anyway, they helped make sure that the accommodations we made for hearing audiences didn’t significantly impact Deaf audiences’ experience with the film.

MODERATOR: And, of course, it has contributed to a widespread conversation about accessibility both in movie theaters and the film industry, which I know I’ve been covering in my classes, as have many of my colleagues. I’m surprised to hear that Jane was originally the main character—partly because Travis Wendall, who played Miles, was just such a fantastic actor and so critical to the film’s success, and partly because the alien sequences seem uniquely suited to a younger point of view.

ABED NADIR: Yeah, in the first draft Jane was hallucinating while on the verge of a major mental breakdown.

MODERATOR: Oh, wow.

ABED NADIR: Like I said, it wasn’t as much of a kid’s movie at first.

MODERATOR: Apparently! Was it difficult, putting together an ASL script, hiring actors…?

ABED NADIR: No, not really. I’m fluent in ASL—I learned some in college to impress a girl—

[Laughter]

ABED NADIR: That didn’t work out. I picked it back up later. But I’ve been signing for a couple of years now, so I was able to do the first round of translations when Marisol and I were completely rewriting the script on short notice. Casting was a concern but it turned out to be almost a non-issue. We cast the kids first, because we wanted a Deaf actor for Miles, and for his siblings we wanted kids who were already fluent in ASL because child actors have more work restrictions and we weren’t sure if they would be able to pick it up quickly. After that, we cast Gordon Anderson, who plays the father—he was studying ASL already, so Maya Rudolph ended up being the only one who needed to learn it from scratch, and honestly she killed it—

[Applause]

ABED NADIR: Which is really hard for an actor to do, because when you sign, your face is supposed to be very expressive, that’s part of the grammar of ASL, and people who are just learning it are always concentrating too hard to do that. I have chronic robot-face, so that’s the hardest part for me. Then as an actor you have to overcome that concentration, be expressive as a natural speaker of ASL, and also express any hidden emotions the character might be feeling. It’s hard. But once we got the right cast, it was so easy. They were all really, really good. I spent a lot more time figuring out camera angles than coaching the actors.

MODERATOR: That’s great, thank you. I’d love to talk more about this, but I think we need to move on to your most recent film, _The Pen._ Now, bear with me here, because there’s really no easy way to summarize this movie. This quirky coming-of-age film stars Yusef Kazi in the breakout role of Mo Sahib, for which he was nominated for Best Actor. Mo is a shy community college student who one day is approached by the ghost of Benjamin Green, played by Tyler James Williams*, an adventurer who had attempted to travel from New York to California in 1856. Benjamin claims that he needs to find a pen to finish a letter to his long-lost love in order to finally be at peace. The movie features frequent flashbacks to his travels through the untamed West with the help of a half-Arapaho guide, while Mo attempts to find a pen that fits the ghost’s inexplicable and ever-changing requirements. Things come to a head when Benjamin steals a pen of sentimental value from a student in Mo’s study group, over his objections. The film has been widely praised for its depiction of not one but three queer characters of color, as Mo helps Benjamin come to terms with the fact that his lost love is not the girl he left in his hometown, but the guide with whom he was traveling, and subsequently accepts his own same-sex desires as well. In addition to Kazi’s Best Actor nod, _The Pen_ also received a nomination for Best Editing and a win for Best Original Screenplay—and if I can editorialize a bit, you were absolutely robbed of a Best Director nomination at the very least.

ABED NADIR: Thank you. I was nominated for the Golden Globe, though.

MODERATOR: Yes, of course.

ABED NADIR: Gotta feel sorry for the Golden Globes. They’re kind of like the _Star Wars_ opening crawl, where it was cool in the first one but then for every subsequent movie you’re just like “we basically know this, just give us a hint of what’s coming up and move on already.”

MODERATOR: That is a very interesting way of putting it, but, yeah. What can you tell us about this film?

ABED NADIR: Well, it’s based on a true story, except the true story is totally unbelievable. I took Spanish in college, and I was part of a Spanish study group.

MODERATOR: Sorry—sorry, I’m interrupting—are you quadrilingual? By my count we’re at English, ASL, Arabic, and now Spanish.

ABED NADIR: Yes and no. My Spanish teacher had faked his qualifications, so my Spanish is still so bad that Marisol laughs at me any time she hears me speak it. But also my mother is Polish, so yes, I’m quadrilingual in English, ASL, Arabic, and Polish.

[Cheers and whistles from the audience]

MODERATOR: Oh, well, if that’s all.

ABED NADIR: Yeah. Anyway. Spanish study group. We were a quirky family of adorable misfits—we took classes together all four years and we’re still friends toady. One day, as we were about to leave our study room, my friend Annie realized she was missing a pen, and not for the first time. There was a ten-minute window where it could have disappeared, but no one would confess to taking it, so we ended up locking the doors and searching each other and having this huge fight about where it could have gone. We bottle episoded ourselves. We never found the pen that day—we left without it. Now, this is the part I could never put in a film because nobody would buy it: a monkey took the pen.

[Laughter]

MODERATOR: [laughing] A monkey took the pen?

ABED NADIR: Yes. A pet monkey had gotten loose on campus and was living in the vents. A couple months later, we found the monkey and a bunch of the stuff it had taken, including a stash of pens. It was a great callback.

MODERATOR: This sounds like a very interesting community college.

ABED NADIR: You have no idea.

MODERATOR: So how did the ghost come into the script?

ABED NADIR: Well, it still goes back to that incident. First we searched the room, then we started throwing around accusations, then my best friend at the time suggested maybe a ghost had taken it. Cut to two, three hours later. We had searched everyone’s bags, torn up a section of the carpeting, knocked down some bookshelves, stripped to our underwear, and cut the casts off our friend’s broken legs. No pen. And everyone was really upset, because now it wasn’t just a matter of someone taking a pen. It was one of us lying to the rest, for hours, and letting us put ourselves in a really uncomfortable situation. And then our Hawkeye—MASH-style not Avengers-style—came back to the ghost idea. We agreed to blame the ghost.

MODERATOR: Two questions: Did you learn about the monkey before or after you started working on the screenplay, and if you’re still in contact with the friend who first brought up the ghost, how do they feel about you using their idea to win an Oscar?

ABED NADIR: That friend is now my husband, so he’s cool with it. I learned about the monkey before I started writing. To be honest, I was never interested in the monkey as a plot device. That’s a little heavy on the hijinks—there are some hijinks in this movie, when Mo is trying to find other pens when they first meet, but the conclusion is much more simple. And really, the thing that got me interested in that whole episode as a plot _was_ very simple. One member of our group was skeptical about why a ghost would steal a pen, and Troy, my husband, started telling this story about a ghost from 1856 writing in his diary and missing his long-lost love. It always stuck with me, I guess. That’s pretty much where the similarities between his plot and mine end because his version leaned towards cheesy melodrama, but I liked hearing him tell it.

MODERATOR: Do you have to share the Oscar?

ABED NADIR: I think my kids stole the Oscar the second it came home. I haven’t seen it in a while.

MODERATOR: Now, hearing that this movie was inspired by real events, it’s made me even more curious—to what extent would you say this film is autobiographical? Because there’s also the sort of surface-level similarities between you and Mo. Both queer, both first generation Muslim-Americans, both community college students from Colorado…

ABED NADIR: Yeah… I’ve gotten this question before, and I think some people look at it too literally. Of my two most recent films, I think Mo is probably the character least like me as a _character_ , which is why he’s most like me on the surface. I know—that’s wrinkling your brain, right? See, Jane, Miles, even Benjamin, their character arcs deal with things I’ve dealt with, and to some extent they think the way I think. Mo doesn’t. I don’t have a problem with talking to people—if anything, I have a problem with shutting up. A lot of his personality is about avoiding attention and being insecure about who he is, whereas I’ve always been pretty comfortable with myself even if other people aren’t. I think probably the biggest difference, and it’s an important one, is the scene where Benjamin steals the pen and Mo’s study group is confronting each other—you can tell he’s not close to the group. He gets pulled into the argument, but he also gets to go off in a corner and be dramatic with Benjamin, and they let him because they don’t know him well and aren’t paying close attention. That’s completely the opposite of my experience with my study group, where we were very tight-knit and I was as invested as everybody else.

I consider myself a student of human character, and I’m very good at predicting story arcs, either in movies or in real life, but I do have a hard time understanding people. And to write a character well, you need to _understand_ them. So the reason, I think, that Mo resembles me so much in the surface details is that I already knew all that stuff really well, and it freed up brain space to deal with those deeper personal issues. I’m not saying that the things we do have in common are superficial, but I don’t think his experience or growth in this movie mirrors my life.

MODERATOR: That’s very interesting—and one of the reasons why we were so excited to have you for this lecture series, because while we are featuring directors, many of our students are of course just starting to figure out their path in the industry, and for their assignments don’t have the luxury of a large, experienced, specialized crew, so talking to writer-directors is particularly helpful. You’ve mentioned your writing partner, Marisol de Soto, but can you talk for a minute about how that collaborative process works?

ABED NADIR: Yeah. I write a first draft, then I email it to Marisol. She reads it once without commenting, then reads it again while tearing it apart. I read through her edits once without commenting, then read it again tearing her apart, then we meet in person to argue about it. We used to meet in one of our apartments, but our respective partners have banned us from our apartments when we’re working because we kept trying to pull them into the arguments, so now we meet on neutral ground. We started wearing cowboy hats to meetings as a homage to the classic “this town ain’t big enough for the two of us” moment before a shootout in Western films, although usually the meeting concludes with us deciding that this town is actually big enough for the two of us.

MODERATOR: And that helps?

ABED NADIR: It does. It’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you’re wearing a ten-gallon hat and a fringed vest in a downtown Starbucks. People give you looks.

MODERATOR: I don’t know if that translates to New York.

[Laughter]

MODERATOR: And in addition to being both a writer and a director, you’ve also worked in both TV and film. First off, do you have a favorite?

ABED NADIR: Yes, and it’s TV. A lot of people think that TV is less prestigious than film, especially for directors, and that might be true, but… Film is like a vacation. You set aside time to leave your daily life and experience it. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, and you can revisit it if you really love it, but it ends. The investment is negligible. TV is home. It’s a part of your routine, it’s a part of your space—maybe that’s not as true now as it was when I was a kid, when you pretty much only watched TV in your living room according to a set schedule, but still. The characters are with us for longer than movie characters and many of us can chart significant moments in our lives based on the TV we were watching at the time. We invest in TV, which makes the risks, the rewards, and the responsibilities greater than film. And that’s just as a viewer. As a creator—it’s inevitable that eventually you’re going to make something bad. When you’re making a movie, that’s terrifying, because you only have two hours to tell a story, and if thirty of those minutes are bad, there’s a very real chance you don’t get to recover. And if you don’t get to recover, you might not get a chance to make another movie, good or bad, unless—am I allowed to badmouth other directors in this thing?

MODERATOR: We’d prefer you didn’t.

ABED NADIR: Not even Brett Ratner?

[Laughter]

MODERATOR: No…

ABED NADIR: Okay, fine. Anyway. That’s not true for TV. Any TV show that runs for a more than, say, a season and a half is bound to have at least one bad episode—except for _Cougartown_ , that show was flawless and I will stand by every minute of it—so there’s something forgiving about TV. As a creator, you’re forced to confront the reality that your career will have its weak moments, and as viewers we need to be gracious and accept the bad with the good. It’s a very intimate experience, making and watching TV.

MODERATOR: You know, most of the directors we have in this lecture series are film-focused, and I think that’s the most eloquent, passionate defense of television we’ve ever had in one of these talks, so thank you for that.

ABED NADIR: I just found out that a pilot I produced got picked up, so I think today I care even more about TV than usual, and that’s saying something.

MODERATOR: Oh, congratulations. Can you tell us what it’s about?

ABED NADIR: Yeah, it’s called _Ballad of the Bard,_ and it’s a show about a group of people playing a Dungeons & Dragons-type RPG, so it’s half about the players and their lives and half about their campaigns—kind of like _Galavant*_ meets _Lord of the Rings*_ meets the _Jumanji*_ remake. It’s going to be really cool.

MODERATOR: Do you play Dungeons & Dragons?

ABED NADIR: Sometimes, yeah. I love DnD. I think all directors would love being a Dungeon Master if they tried it, because we’re all control freaks and we always have a massive amount of background information in our brains that will never get put into any real script, but in DnD the characters might very well wander off track and you get to use everything. I haven’t played it in a while, though. My LA crew, we started when we were all struggling industry professionals and it’s harder to get together now that we’re all successful industry professionals, and my college crew think I’m the most obnoxious DM ever.

MODERATOR: [laughing] Why is that?

ABED NADIR: Because I’m good! Okay, listen up, because this is true for film, too. If you want to make good sci-fi and fantasy stories, your world needs rules, and every rule that affects the plot needs to either be consistent with our natural world or needs to be explained to the audience upfront. Sci-fi and fantasy are games for you and the viewer, and nobody is allowed to cheat. For example: your movie is about humans living on Earth in the year 3005, but they have evolved in a few key ways. They have developed telepathy, which is explored throughout the film. Good. They have also developed the ability to survive contact with hot lava, which does not go explained until the climatic moment when your hero falls into lava and swims out, completely unharmed, as the operatic music swells to indicate victory. BAD. BAD STORYTELLING. It’s a cop-out and a cheat, and when I DM, I don’t let my players cheat. If something is unlikely to happen, then yes, you have to roll the dice and there are no re-rolls. If something is impossible, then it’s impossible. Do my players hate me? Yes. Is our narrative ultimately more satisfying? Also yes.

MODERATOR: My next question was also going to be about the difference between directing TV and directing film, but I think you’ve touched on that already.

ABED NADIR: Yeah. They’re two different jobs, really. Well, you probably know this already, but for anyone who doesn’t, a TV director is only in charge of individual episodes—especially for someone like me, who would only get a few a season. The director is beholden to the executive producer and the writing staff, who are in charge of multi-episode arcs and the show as a whole. So there are limits to what you can do creatively, but that also relieves some of the pressure. There’s still a lot of technical skill involved in TV directing, but on the whole it feels more collaborative, especially if you’re coming into a show in a later season where the actors are heavily invested in their characters. On a movie set, the director has much more freedom to make creative decisions and gets a bigger share of the credit and the blame. I think one of the greatest challenges for a film director is believing your own hype. The first full-length film I tried to make was very, very, very bad because I thought I was really smart and I had too many people telling me I was really smart and not enough people telling me to pull my head out of my own ass. I really recommend finding people who will do that.

MODERATOR: And how does that happen?

ABED NADIR: Marisol is really good at being that person for me. It helps that she’s good at all the things I’m bad at, and she knows it and I know it, so if she’s talking about something from one of those categories, I can’t ignore it. Her advice is almost always right. In general, I would recommend people who have different tastes but still passionately care about things. I have friends who mostly watch shows that fit their image, whether that’s because it makes them seem cool or because it fits their political persona, and I don’t take their advice because I don’t trust that it’s coming from the right place. My friend Shirley, on the other hand, is a devoted Christian and mother of three who tends to have very different standards and opinions on movies but is always thoughtful in her critique. I don’t always take her advice, but I know I should at least give it some weight because I trust that she can genuinely be swayed by the quality of the work and not only its reputation.

And my son Rickie is good at deflating my ego as a person. We were visiting a family friend in DC the day that Oscar nominations went out, and Rickie and I are early risers so we were having breakfast together, and I checked my phone while he was telling me about this video game he had been playing the night before, and when I finally looked up, he had stolen my muffin. He said “you can’t prove that, because you didn’t see anything because you were on your phone” and I said “my movie just got nominated for three Oscars” and he said “great, so now you have three nominations and zero muffins.”

[Laughter]

ABED NADIR: Kids are brutal. But you need that. You need someone in the industry who can give you solid, informed advice, you need someone from the outside who can give you an alternate perspective, and you need someone who makes you step away entirely when you need to.

MODERATOR: Solid advice. Okay, now I do have several more questions I’d love to get to, but it looks like we’re running out of time—I didn’t plan on spending so much time talking about monkeys, and I do want to leave a few minutes for the Q&A section of our talk. So let me just focus on probably the most important question. Now, we discussed the impact that _Voyage of the Star Ship Legacy_ has had on the conversation surrounding disability and film, but there was also a lot of attention paid to _The Pen,_ in particular, because of your Best Original Screenplay nomination and eventual win. You and Marisol de Soto became the first Arab and Latina writers, respectively, to win this award, and only the fourth and fifth people of color ever, after Jordan Peele for _Get Out*_ and Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won for _Parasite*_.

ABED NADIR: Yikes.

MODERATOR: Exactly. It was also one of several critically-acclaimed films that year to feature predominantly non-white leads after years and years of #OscarsSoWhite criticism. Both _Police Justice_ and _Voyage of the Star Ship Legacy_ also featured people of color prominently in the cast. What would you say is your role, as a director and writer of color, in contributing to the conversation about race and representation in film?

[Long pause]

MODERATOR: Is that a hard question?

ABED NADIR: I’m processing.

MODERATOR: Should I rephrase, or—?

ABED NADIR: No, no. It’s just that I say the wrong thing sometimes, and I don’t want to say the wrong thing.

[Pause]

ABED NADIR: When I make movies, I don’t usually try to say something about race. Because I think that movies that try to have that conversation are usually talking about rac _ism_ , so they have to be serious and smart and sometimes they get a little preachy, and that’s not the kind of stuff I want to make. I’m especially aware of that problem, being half Palestinian, because it’s almost impossible to find a movie with Palestinian characters that isn’t about terrorism or overcoming the differences between Palestinians and Israelis, and I like to make movies about aliens and robots and ghosts, so that’s a little far out of my wheelhouse.

[Laughter]

ABED NADIR: And also not something I relate to very well. I was at a party in LA once where someone asked me what I thought of _Paradise Now*_ , and if I felt it had accurately depicted my experience. To be clear, she asked if a film about the recruitment of suicide bombers accurately depicted my experience of growing up twenty miles outside of Denver and spending a month in Gaza in high school to go to my cousin Saad’s wedding and meet my grandparents. The answer is no, it didn’t, and I have no interest in trying to tell that story, or, honestly, of trying to make the definitive film about the experience of Muslims in America. The stuff that had the most influence on me as a person and a filmmaker, the stuff I want to emulate, is cheesy 80s teen dramas and classic sci-fi. I’m fine with letting other, smarter, more serious directors get credit for making things like _Paradise Now*_ or _Moonlight*_ or _Roma*_.

But at the same time… for years, my dad wouldn’t watch any Western media because he thought it was all full of negative stereotypes of Arabs, and if I said “no, Dad, it’s fine, this show doesn’t have any Arabs in it,” he would say “that’s even worse.”

[Chuckling]

ABED NADIR: And I have two black sons who are still pretty young but are getting to be teenagers now, and if they look for people like them on TV and movies, they’re still mostly going to see gang members or football players with white mentors, and that’s hard for them, as smart, sensitive kids who, no offense, aren’t _that_ great at sports. And I can’t fix everything, but I want to fix that perception issue. I want to be able to take my whole family to a movie and have us all walk out without feeling bad about ourselves.

[Applause]

ABED NADIR: So it’s not that race has no place in my movies. I still make the homages I want to make, except that a lot of cheesy 80s movies and classic sci-fi was made by white people featuring mostly white people—although not entirely, and if we want to turn this into a 6-hour interview about the role of diversity in _Star Trek_ and _Inspector Spacetime,_ I absolutely will do that—and I try to make sure that the cast reflects the diversity of not only the setting, but life in general. Race can still be important to the story even if it’s not the _topic_ of the movie. Like, _Crazy Rich Asians*_ —who here has seen _Crazy Rich Asians_?

[Scattered applause]

ABED NADIR: Great movie. Race isn’t the topic—it isn’t trying to explain [air quotes] the Asian experience [end air quotes] by comparing it to a white American experience—but at the same time, the plot relies on having an Asian cast. It’s more similar to _The Pen,_ where Benjamin, Mo, and John all have lives heavily influenced by their race and ethnic backgrounds. _To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before*_ came out about a week after _Crazy Rich Asians,_ and is more of a straightforward American story that could technically be told with actors of any ethnicity, except that the creator wanted it to have a Korean-American lead and it is objectively perfect that way, which is closer to how I approached the casting for _Voyage._ It was a race-blind casting call originally, then when we cast a biracial actor for Miles, we ended up with a mostly black and biracial cast. It didn’t affect the plot, but I’ve gotten feedback that that was meaningful for a lot of people. I’ve also gotten some backlash, but it’s easily the stupidest criticism I’ve ever gotten, so I don’t care.

[Laughter]

MODERATOR: Such as?

ABED NADIR: Okay, here. [Pause. Reading from cell phone.] This is from twitter. “Hey @AbedsTweets, what have you got against white people? It's like you’d rather hit every quota w/ 1 character than make a good movie. Gotta have a BLACK”—all caps—“deaf kid, gotta have a gay Muslim—in Colorado of all places (80% white). It’s just so forced.” What quota? There’s no quota. We put out a call for Deaf actors and the best one we saw was black. That’s it. You think Mo is ‘forced’ because you’ve never met a queer Muslim from Colorado? You’re literally tweeting at one!

[Laughter]

ABED NADIR: It’s stupid. I’m not bothered by criticism like that because I don’t care about stupid people.

MODERATOR: Okay, thank you so much for answering all _my_ questions, and now we have time for, I believe, three or four questions from the audience. We have volunteers going around with microphones, so if you have a question for Abed, please raise your hands… oh, wow, great.

[Pause]

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Hi, I just want to say I really love your work, I saw _Voyage of the Star Ship Legacy_ in theaters three times—

ABED NADIR: Cool.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: And I saw another interview you did where you talked about some of the projects you worked on in college, so I actually looked up the webpage for the Greendale Community College film department and found some of your older work—

ABED NADIR: Oh, really?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Yeah, they have a kind of, like… digital shrine? It’s a little creepy, actually.

ABED NADIR: That tends to happen with any Greendale alumni who become even mildly successful. There’s a brass statue of Luis Guzman on the quad. What did they have up?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Uh, there were a couple of sketches, a commercial, and some documentaries: The Bequeathings of Pierce Hawthorne, Apocalypse Dean, Changnesia, and Pillows and Blankets.

ABED NADIR: Oh.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: So I actually have two questions. The first one is, have you ever thought about making a documentary for wide release? And the second one is, how did you navigate being both a subject and a creator in the Pillows and Blankets documentary?

ABED NADIR: I really like making documentaries. I think they’re especially good for student filmmakers, because they let you practice the mechanics of filmmaking without getting overly caught up in the story. You get to play around with camera angles and settings, editing, and soundtrack, and how those create story arcs, instead of putting so much effort into character creation and script. As for whether I’d make another one now, I’m not sure. Sometimes I just like taking on that documentarian role in my life as a way to process things… I don’t like to make documentaries about things I have to do a lot of research on. I wouldn’t go out and make a movie about the rainforest or some societal issue I don’t know anything about—I’d rather document something my friends or acquaintances are doing, but it’s a lot easier to convince your friends and acquaintances to let you film their lives when you’re a student and they know nobody is going to watch it, and that pretty much isn’t an option once Steven Spielberg tells a reporter that he took his grandkids to see _Voyage of the Star Ship Legacy_ over the weekend and they had a great time.

[Applause]

ABED NADIR: That was, objectively speaking, the best day of my life, but it totally killed the no-one-will-ever-know argument, because now there is a very real chance that Steven Spielberg would know.

MODERATOR: Okay, just because they’ve come up several times, I feel obligated to remind you that you also have a spouse and two children.

ABED NADIR: It’s fine, Troy knows it was the best day of my life, and there’s no way my kids are ever going to watch this video, not when they finally have a night off from listening to me talk about movies. So, to answer your first question, I don’t have plans to release a documentary any time soon, but I won’t say it’ll never happen. We’ll see. What was your other question?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: About Pillows and Blankets?

ABED NADIR: Right...

MODERATOR: Sorry, just, for those of us who haven’t visited the website, would you mind explaining what that is?

ABED NADIR: Yeah. Pillows and Blankets is an homage I made to Ken Burns’s _Civil War_ , about a pillow fight my—sorry, if I just say ‘Troy,’ will you guys remember who that is? Because I keep going back and forth between back then, when we were friends, and now, when we’re married, and I feel like it’s going to get confusing.

[Various positive noises from the audience]

ABED NADIR: Okay, cool. It was about a pillow fight Troy and I got into over whether to build the world’s largest blanket fort and get a Guinness World Record or build a smaller but more artistically designed pillow fort.

MODERATOR: That sounds incredible.

ABED NADIR: Yeah. [Pause] Actually, it sucked. It really, really sucked. Even when it was happening, people said it was a dumb fight because it was just about a pillow fort, but that’s not what it was about. It was about… the struggle to achieve artistic success and independence and the struggle to love someone, integrate them into your life, and place their needs above your own self-interest. And whether you’re capable of fully doing either of those things, let alone doing both, or whether you need to sacrifice one for the other. To this day, that’s probably the lowest point in our relationship. It wasn’t a joke—Troy and I came really close to never speaking again. [Pause] I don’t blame people for not getting that. I made the documentary to deflect attention, so that when classmates said “hey, what was that crazy pillow fight about?” I could say “watch the documentary!”, or if my friends said “Hey Abed, we should really talk about what just happened,” I could pull out a camera and make them talk to that instead of me.

It’s much harder to be the subject in a documentary, as opposed to the creator, because the stakes are so much higher. It’s harder to disengage from the material, harder to observe other people’s motivations and understand your own. That’s why I started making documentaries in the first place, to try and get perspective. Framing something from your life as if it were a narrative, a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and characters whose traits and objectives are logical and consistent, is very helpful, but of course life isn’t like that, so when you’re _living_ it, things are more complicated. And even then, most of the documentaries I made were a few steps removed from me, personally—they were about people I knew, or re-enactments from my life years later. I hadn’t even been the one documenting the pillow fight when it happened because I was too invested in it; I got most of my footage from a film crew that Guinness had sent out. It was a way to process what had happened, and I made it mostly for an audience of friends and classmates who knew most of what was going on already. It’s weird to think of it like any other documentary I made, or something that strangers can watch without that context. [Pause] I think I’m fine with it. Yeah. It doesn’t tell the whole story, but nothing ever does. Thank you for telling me that was online; I didn’t know that, and I’d like to see it again, I think. And if anyone here does happen to watch it, please don’t tweet at me with unsolicited marriage advice or insults over a decade-old argument that’s not even accurately depicted. Like I said, it was a low point. Is there another question?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: Yeah, um, hi, my question is about how you come up with your ideas. I had this big argument with one of my friends when _Voyage of the Star Ship Legacy_ came out because I thought it was a science fiction movie and she thought it was a family drama, and then _The Pen_ kind of does the same thing where it’s like… supernatural fiction comedy historical adventure coming-of-age story. But somehow it still works, so I was just wondering if you have advice for how we can be that creative if we’ve never, like, had a monkey steal stuff from us.

[Laughter]

ABED NADIR: Watch everything. That’s the first and most important thing. Watch comedies and drama and sci-fi and horror and cartoons—watch everything. The best way to make stuff that you like is to know what you like. The trick is, when you sit down to write, pull from a lot of different sources. The likelihood of writing something entirely 100% original is basically zero, so you have to accept that you’ll copy some stuff you like, but if everything you copy is from one source or even a small handful of similar sources, then at best you end up with something generic, and at worst it’s blatant plagiarism. It’s the combination of different elements that makes a story unique. Me, personally, I don’t typically stick to one genre because I like to tell stories about ordinary people with ordinary human conflicts, and then introduce a fantastic element like aliens, dragons, ghosts to help them cope with that story. That feels real to me. That might not work for everybody, so my advice is don’t just play around with little things like character, genre, or plot, but with different methods and structures of storytelling.

And definitely don’t try to write for a wide audience on the first draft. Either write it for yourself, or think of one or two people you know well and write it for them as individuals. If you try to please everyone, you’ll end up with something bland and unremarkable, like every post- _Black Panther*_ Marvel movie and 50% of pre- _Black Panther_ Marvel movies, and I’m not apologizing for that one.

MODERATOR: Fair enough. We have time for one more audience question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: So, this maybe isn’t the deepest question, but I think it’s really cool how all night you’ve been, like, talking about other movies that you like and praising—or dissing—other creators, because I feel like a lot of the time there’s this weird disconnect between people who make stuff and people who consume it, and I was just wondering if you could tell us some of your favorite movies.

ABED: That’s an amazing question. Now are we talking favorite movies to watch, or the movies I think are the best?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: Both, I guess?

ABED: Then we might be here for a while. My favorite movies are Kickpuncher, Kickpuncher 2: Codename Punchkicker, Kickpuncher The Final Kickening, Kickpuncher Detroit, Kickpuncher Miami, and Kicksplasher, Short Circuit 2, The Inspector Spacetime Christmas Special, Ghostbusters (1984), Ghostbusters (2016), An American Werewolf in London, Back to The Future, Coco, Blade Runner, Stand By Me, Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI, The Lord of the Rings original trilogy extended edition only because I’m not a coward, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Jaws, The Breakfast Club, Raising Arizona, Jurassic Park only the first one, Seven, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, Goonies, The Matrix, The Dark Knight, Stand By Me, Real Genius, Better Off Dead, The Fog of War, Pulp Fiction, Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer, Goodfellas, Toy Story 3, Saw, Get Out, Blazing Saddles, Die Hard, Blade, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Batteries Not Included, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, The Martian, and Mad Max: Fury Road. In no particular order. Do you want them in a particular order? Because I can go through that too but there’s a 26-way tie for first place, a 14-way tie for second place, a 4-way tie for third place, and an 8-way tie for fourth place.

[Pause]

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: No, that’s okay. Thank you.

MODERATOR: Yes, thank you, Abed, for this very wide-ranging and informative talk. We are unfortunately almost out of time, but there is one more question that we’ve been asking all of our guests and I’d love to hear your take on it. Basically, if you could sum up your approach to filmmaking in a few words, what would you say?

ABED NADIR: Hm. [Pause] In general, I’m not classy enough for live theater, but I did have to take a theater class for my film major, and one of the scripts we read was for Tony Kushner’s _Angels in America*_. There’s a production note I love: “The moments of magic are to be fully realized as wonderful bits of theatrical illusion—which means it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing.” Those of us who love film love to see how it’s put together. We like tropes as long as they’re not outdated and not overused. We like good puppets and models better than bad CGI. We like cheap movies made with genuine passion over glossy, soulless megastudio blockbusters, and the truth is, suspension of disbelief is never going to completely make people forget that they’re sitting in a cold theater eating raisinets, so don’t worry about trying to achieve perfection. We like to see the strings and wires.

At the same time… believe in everything you ask of the audience. There’s too much cynicism in the world, too much holier-than-thou smugness and irony, and a movie that’s all self-deprecation and no genuine heart is just as bad as one with no self-awareness. And I hate it when I see creators mocking fandom, or worse, having their characters mocking elements of fandom in text, because if we’re asking people to care about what we make, we should care, too. Making a film is no more and no less than telling a story, and we do that because we want to form relationships. We create stories because we want to understand people, then we share them because we want to be understood. I don’t pretend to be an expert on relationships, but I know that any good one is founded on honesty. Don’t pretend to be perfect or cooler or more sophisticated than you are. Be honest.

[Applause]

ABED NADIR: That was more than a few words.

MODERATOR: But every one of them important. And I’m sure I speak for not only myself, but everyone here when I say I’ve greatly enjoyed talking with you, I’ve always been a fan of your work, and I will certainly be tuning in to _Ballad of the Bard_ and whatever else comes next. Please, everyone join me in a round of applause for Abed Nadir, as well as our interpreter and our tech crew for another wonderful installment of the Behind the Camera series. And remember, if you are receiving class credit for attending tonight, the sign-in sheets are at the table in the lobby.

[Applause]

ABED NADIR: Thank you. Thanks. Also, please check out my Twitter feed, there’s a pinned tweet with a petition to bring _The Cape_ back, #sixseasonsandamovie.

[End of transcript]


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